19789: Lawless: USAID Funding (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Robert Lawless <robert.lawless@wichita.edu>

The current issue of Newsweek carries this rather extraordinary paragraph
in the story about Haiti:

The rebels emerged virtually overnight. "The real mystery is where these
guys are coming from," says Thayer Scott of the International Republican
Institute, a group funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development
to foster democracy in Haiti. "They are organized; they have uniforms; they
have better weapons than the old Haitian Army had the last time the U.S.
intervened. And here they are, out of the blue."

Is the "surprise" displayed by Scott actually feigned? Is it self-serving?
Does the left hand truly not know what the right hand is doing? Does anyone
really think it is a mystery where the putsches got their brand-new weapons
and other military equipment?

Of course, we all knew that the anti-Aristide opposition was being funded
by the U.S. government, but I don't recall such a blunt statement from a
mainstream U.S. publication that the International Republican Institute,
the main conduit for monies to the Convergence, Democratic Platform, Group
of 184, whatever, was funded by the USAID, which is an agency of the U.S.
State Department. The USAID does not fund anything that it does not control
nor anything that is not in line with U.S. foreign policy. The real mystery
is that Newsweek apparently did not consider it unusual enough for a story
in itself that the U.S. government has been funding a non-elected,
undetermined but probably relatively small number of malcontents while
economically strangling the legitimate, internationally recognized
government. What's the amount of the funding? I've seen the figure $70
million several places, but I don't know the source for that number. The
USAID budget is not secret. If the average citizen can't figure it out,
then some Congressional oversight committee surely can. Of course, who
knows what the CIA has been funding.